The Baby Name Debacle AKA Name-Gate
by comewithnattah
Summary: Can Grimes 2.0 decide what to name the twins? Stand alone; One shot.


"NO!" Michonne raised her pitch, having none of it. She was about to shake her head right off her neck.

"What's wrong with that?" Rick countered, raising his shoulders, dumbfounded at how strongly she was disagreeing with him.

"It's not happening Rick." She wouldn't even dignify him with eye contact, instead concentrating on the cucumbers she was chopping. She was standing far away from the surface of the kitchen island, thanks to her protruding belly. It made her chopping technique very clumsy, so she was already a little irked."We're not naming the babies after cars. That is so ghetto."

"Ghetto?" Rick scrunched his face, indignant. "Corvettes and Mustangs are NOT ghetto! Those are my dream cars. Quality cars! What even is _ghetto_? I hate that word."

"I'm not saying the cars are ghetto." Michonne came right back to correct him. "I'm saying naming your offspring after cars is ghetto."

"You wanted to name the girl Mercedes!" Rick reminded her, scoffing from the sink where he was washing tomatoes, lettuce and other trimmings for their salad.

"After my grand-moth-er, Rick. My grand-moth-er! Not a car!" She sneered, still disgusted by his proposal. "Look, Mercedes means mercy. What does Corvette mean?" She allowed him a short respite to give an answer. When he didn't have one she was pleased with that small win and disclosed the basis for her view, "I went to college with a girl named Lexus. Everybody made fun of her name. She was a smart girl but it wasn't easy for her to get a job. She had to go by her initials: L.J."

Rick's mind was unchanged. "Uh, Michonne. I think you're forget'n our kids ain't gonna be presentin' resumés to stuffy corporate suits. Mercedes is still on the list. Right, Carl?"

Carl dragged his pencil up the paper he'd been scribbling the possible baby names on. "Yeah." He found it. "Mercedes. Got it."

Rick continued. "Corvette? That's a cute name. We can literally name 'em whatever the hell we want! We could name 'em Apples and Oranges and it won't make or break 'em."

Judith perked at the sound of that, "I like Apples and Oranges. Name them fruit."

"No, Jude. That was just an example... I didn't mean..." Rick began to backtrack.

"It was a good example daddy." Judith congratulated him, coloring aggressively with her third shade of purple.

"You see what you're doing?" Michonne said to Rick, gesturing towards their little one with a justified smirk. "You're making this ridiculous. She wants us to name them fruit now..."

"Ok. Wait. Wait." Rick held his palms out in front of him to calm everyone down. Naming these twins was becoming a hilarious kind of World War III. Rick turned to Carl, "Read what we've got so far."

Carl leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table, "Okay." He called them off.  
"Glenn,  
Deanna,  
Sophia,  
Mercedes,  
Tyrese,  
Nef- Nef-"

"Ne-fer-ti-ti!" Michonne stressed every syllable.

"Carl can't even say the name, 'Chonne." Rick criticized. "I think we can at least agree that we should name the babies something we can all pronounce.

Michonne rolled her eyes. "He will _learn_ to pronounce it. He should have learned about this black queen in school. But I digress."

Carl tried again, " 'Net-er-feri' "

Michonne threw up her hands at the mispronunciation but held her tongue.

"Cleopatra... " Carl was proud to say, "heard of her...  
Infinity,  
Hulk,  
Thor..."

"No. No, Carl. No." Michonne turned in his direction pointing her finger. "I told you to scratch those off." Michonne demanded tersely.

Carl looked to his father for support and Rick, complicit in Carl's plot, eyed him in solidarity. Rick would never really name the babies Hulk and Thor but he got a sick satisfaction from driving Michonne mad with the suggestion. "What about Jason?" Rick offered.

"Jason?" Michonne repeated. "The masked serial killer? No." She didn't even entertain it.

"No." Rick challenged her, "Not the killer Jason. Jason was the name of my best friend growin' up."

"Oh." Michonne began to tone down. "Jason..." She tried the name on for size. She sort of liked it... kind of.

"Oh, yeah. Your dog. Right?" Carl recalled the stories about Jason the beagle.

Rick was actually trying to keep the species of his best friend a secret. But thanks to Carl's loose lips, the cat- or dog- was out of the bag.

"A damn dog, Rick?" Michonne said flatly. She was beside herself.

"Ok." Rick conceded and laughed. "But he _was_ my best friend when I was little. He was a good boy."

"I'm gonna throw you out this kitchen." She threatened him playfully. "You're off this baby-naming committee. Anybody that names a dog something like Jason... isn't fit to pick names for animals or humans."

"What?! He looked like a Jason!" He blasted, defending the designation with a wry smile.

"I got your Jason." She said and threw a cucumber slice at him. It bounced off his chest and he caught it in his hands, taunting her with an absurd chomp.

"Mommy, we could name the babies Emoji and Google." Judith put in her two cents and everyone in the kitchen came to a halt.

Michonne turned from the kitchen counter, "What?"

"Where did you hear those words?" Rick queried.

Judith pointed to the boy taking minutes. Carl sighed. "I told her about cell phones." He reluctantly admitted not making eye contact with his parents, though he was warming to the idea of the quirky names rather quickly.

Michonne answered Judith calmly, "Jude, those aren't names, sweetie."

"They _can_ be names if we call the babies that." Judith made the point.

Carl whispered down at the table. "It's kinda cool." causing Michonne to stare him down and mentally count to ten.

"I like how it sounds. Eeeee-mo-ji..." Judith toyed with the vowels on her tongue. "Goooooooooo-gle."

Rick and Michonne looked at each other and reached a silent truce in the face of such terrible, pop culture evil. But Michonne yielded to her husband's lead for fear she'd explode.

Instead of making Emoji and Google a whole thing with his daughter, Rick wisely deflected and asked, "What else you got, hon?"

"Ummm..." Judith took a while to think.

While she searched the files of her young mind, Carl lit up, "Ooo!" He chuckled out his idea, "What about Beyonce and Jay-Z! Dad, remember when you had a crush on Beyonce and you were singing Crazy in Love all the time?"

Rick stilled with embarrassment. "I knew it!" Michonne cheered, pointing at his back as Rick refused to turn from the sink to face her.

"No, son, I do not remember that." Rick said with a lowered head and robotic awkwardness.

Michonne came for him, "I knew I heard you singing Beyonce in the shower!"

"Carl..." Rick held out a hand to his son for help.

But Michonne took this revelation and ran with it. "So who do you think is more bootylicious, Rick? Me or Beyonce." She teased him raising her eyebrow, daring him to answer incorrectly.

"Wait, who is Beyonce?" Rick played stupid. "She had her own talk show, right?"

Michonne angled her knife toward him, "Don't play with me, Richard."

"Look, I thought we were naming the babies. Why are we talking about this stuff?" Rick blushed as he begged off.

"Oooooooh, you don't want to talk about Beyonce?" Michonne teased him lightly. "Then I don't want to talk about babies named Hulk and Thor... anymore!"

Rick waved his fingers back and forth across his neck at his son. "Scratch out Hulk and Thor, Carl."

All this time Judith was oblivious to her father's shame and she came up with her idea of perfect names for the new additions to the Grimes clan,

"Sweet Little Cute Baby and Pretty!" She shouted. As it came into her mind, it fell right off her tongue.

Again the kitchen froze, lost in the randomness of Judith's mind.

"Here, Rick. Toss this salad." Michonne instructed her husband, breaking the silence and passing him the large bowl she'd been filling with sliced veggies.

Rick jumped with wide eyes and parted lips at her request until he saw the bowl. The look on his face clued Michonne in on his perception of her words and they both shared a secret giggle.

"Okay, you two. Go upstairs and wash up for dinner." Michonne ordered the kids and watched them move with purpose. "And use soap!"

They were both ready to eat, but Judith was still concerned with the baby names. "Carl, did you put Sweet Little Cute Baby and Pretty on the list? Michonne heard her daughter ask as they disappeared up the steps.

"Michonne." Rick exhaled only her name to convey his exhaustion with this process.

"I know." She read him perfectly and responded. "At this rate we might as well just stick with Baby A and Baby B."

"Don't say that around Judith or she'll make us put it on the list." Rick joked.

"Why the hell is this so hard?' She pulled her hair in frustration." Are we over-thinking this? We've both been through this before. Right?"

"Actually," Rick realized as he danced the ingredients around the bowl, "I didn't really have much to do with either of their names. I mean, Carl named Judith after his teacher and Lori picked his name. I just went along with it."

Michonne thought quietly about what he was saying, "Me too. Mike named Andre after his brother who was shot when he was little. I thought that was fair."

"So why is this dif'frent?" Rick wondered out loud. He mulled over his feelings as they wordlessly transferred dinner from the stove to the table together. "I think we're just dif'frent people now." Rick spoke up, answering his own question. "We been through a lot. Thangs mean a lot more than they did, I guess."

"Yeah. You're right." She smiled at his sweet sentimentality.

"These are _our_ babies. Mine and yours. I never thought that would happen." Rick joined her at the table and began to explain, "I mean Carl was a given. I dated Lori in high school. We fell in love, got married." He itemized it all as if he were reading the steps to a mediocre life. "I mean, I never even asked her, really. She started makin' plans with her mom for a weddin' and I just went a long 'cuz I thought tha's what love was." He shrugged, thinking back to how naïve he had been. "Then we tried for a while to get pregnant and it didn't happen for a long time. But, it's crazy... we never even talked about that either." He began to whisper in case the kids came back. He didn't want them to hear his next confessions because he really didn't feel the same way anymore. "She wanted a baby- I really didn't at the time. But that was my wife. Gonna be together forever, right?"

Michonne got it. She knew about losing yourself to a relationship. She knew about not being asked and never asking and living up to expectations you never agreed to. She knew about keeping the boat steady and telling Mike yes when everything in her was screaming no. She _knew_ about it, but now she was with Rick. They shared that common knowledge but not that reality. Not anymore. That's why the names for their precious cargo weren't coming easy. They both had learned to say what they felt. They knew they could speak their minds and it would be okay.

Rick was still pouring out his heart. "Then after I was comfortable so long in that mess, she died and Judith came. And it destroyed me that- worse than not being able to love her like I promised- I couldn't keep her safe." Rick continued, his voice was low and melancholy, "And I knew Judith wasn't mine. That screwed with my head…" He trailed off.

Michonne picked up where he stopped, "So now that everything is right, we're gonna get these names right too, or kill each other in the process, huh?" They laughed but he understood her and he felt the same way. Noticing their serious conversation had gone on without the common interruptions, Michonne switched gears. "What are they doing up there?"

'Hey!" Rick called up though the floorboards. A faint "Coming!" came back, followed by the pounding of running feet.

When they came around the corner, Michonne asked, "Are we gonna eat or what?

Rick was already digging into the chili mac and cheese casserole.

"What took you guys so long?" Rick asked, passing Carl a plate.

"You know Judith plays in the soap and water every time." Carl snitched.

"Don't waste that water, you little bubble buster!" Michonne gently scolded her.

"Sorry." Judith cut her eye at Carl as she bowed her head for grace. She was upset and honestly a bit shocked that he'd told on her. He didn't even notice her death glare with his head buried in his plate. Normally, Carl covered for her, but when hand-washing cuts into chow time all loyalties to little sisters are dissolved. "We gonna read the next chapter tonight daddy?" Judith asked to redirect the table as soon as she said amen.

"You really like that book, huh?" Rick was pleased.

"Which one?" Michonne invited herself to the topic.

"'Epitaph'. It's a cowboy book." Rick revealed. Michonne had encouraged him to introduce Judith to books _he_ found interesting since he was sick of books about dancing bunnies, cake-baking dogs and ballerina cats. He'd found a special edition copy of the novel 'Epitaph' in the library at the Hilltop. "It's all about the O.K. Corral."

"We learned about that in school. Can I read it when you guys are done?" Carl stopped grazing long enough to ask and Rick nodded.

Michonne related, "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was my daddy's favorite movie. He loved Kirk Douglass as Doc Holliday."

"I never saw **that** movie, but Doc Holliday was pretty awesome in Tombstone." Carl reminisced. "I'm ya huckleberry." He quoted his favorite Holliday line from the movie. He made a pistol with his index finger and pretended to shoot Judith.

A little giggle came from her lips and Carl was forgiven. "He's got a fast draw." Judith added. "I'm gonna practice and be just like Doc. Daddy said he's gonna find a holster to fit me."

"Hey." Michonne had an idea, "What if we named the babies after _him_? It's a little better than going with the name of someone we lost." She stated softly. "We lost so many and they all were special to us. That's making it hard to choose, too."

"What did you have in mind?" Rick was intrigued.

She perked her brow. "Doc for the baby boy, Holliday for his sister."

Everybody mulled it over a couple seconds. "I like it." Rick was the first to say.

"Me too." Judith smiled.

"We could call her Holly for short." Carl proposed.

"That's cute." Michonne admitted. Then, not wanting to give up on one of her throwbacks, she suggested timidly, "Holliday Cleopatra?"

Everybody chuckled in relief that names had been picked unanimously. "Okay. Look at that. We all agree." Rick cocked his head with satisfaction. "Now what about Doc's middle name?"

Judith opened her mouth releasing one word with a little chewed lettuce, "Goooooo-gle!"


End file.
